Guild Wars 2

Loved the raptor mount. However, while mounted the camera ignored all my settings (Vertical height near / far).

Please fix this, as the constant camera changes when mounting / dismounting was icky. The camera options were added inthe first place for a reason, so please respect them. (I don’t mind if I can;t see my raptor’s tail – I know it’s there)

I have a GTX 1060. Similar issues with lights going on and off as the camera moves in Tangled Depths.

The problem goes away if I turn off the Light Adaption function.

Were you still on the pre-patch servers, as those often close once everyone starts patching?

The Phyloric valve for Amber Wurm on Triple Trouble is completely bugged.

phys.7689:

when truely examining cost, one most consider not only the price in gold, but the price in time, or price in effort.
…
now, i would argue that how hard an item is to obtain effects its cost, but regardless, within the context of ascended crafting silk is grossly unbalanced in terms of gold cost.

Indeed. My view is that the high price in gold is caused by the price in time/effort to obtain Damask being balanced too high.

The fact that it is hard to obtain, coupled with the fact that a lot of it is required is what pushes up the price, because very few people have the patience to make them without buying at least some of the raw materials off the trading post.

You can’t farm for leather any more easily than you can farm for cloth, but leather prices are still low. So it doesn’t look like the farmability of silk is the driving factor behind the price. (At the end of the day, most people who play the game do so to have fun, not to farm like a crazy fool all day.)

It’s the overly onerous amounts of silk required for light ascended armor that is pushing the price up. If you ignore the trading post, it takes significantly more “normal” playing time to craft it than the medium or heavy equivalents.

It may seem like a good idea from an economics point of view to have some materials worth a lot more than others, but making it so light armor wearers have a much harder time crafting their armor wasn’t really a fair way of doing it.

Things like Silver Doubloons being hard to come by aren’t such a problem, because Juggernaut is a luxury item, as opposed to being the only way to get a Best In Class hammer.

Hi John,

I just put together a little spreadsheet showing the cost of the raw materials required to build a set of ascended armor. I limited it to only the materials that vary between armor classes. (Scraps, sections, ore, and related threads/lumps). The totals I came out with were:

Light: 368 gold
Medium: 283 gold
Heavy: 280 gold

1. Was it deliberate to have such a large disparity in crafting costs for Light armor compared to the other weights?

2. If so, what have you got against Light armor-wearers?

3. If not, what unexpected factor caused your calculations to go awry?

Cheers
Dave

Evan, could you check my match record too for yesterday?

The match which appears to be missing on the leaderboard started as a 5v4, where I was on the team with 5, so we trounced the other team somewhat. I definitely didn’t leave before the end, because I was happy with the easy win, and made a comment in the chat afterwards regarding it.

Something is definitely not working properly.

I played 4 games yesterday, with 2 wins and 2 losses, but my leaderboard score only shows 1 win. Somewhere a game got lost along the way despite my finishing all of them :-/

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Hi Chris!

Any word from Leah and her team regarding the problem I mentioned before?

And it’s good to know that you’ll be well.

Hi Malk,

I have asked them to post an update but they are super busy. So if they don’t today I will swing by and then update on their behalf. I have been forwarding yours and others info to them and they have been using it. So thank you very much.

Chris

This post on Reddit has a nice summary of some of the issues with the Lvl 70 + 80 personal stories – http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2ghcku/so_there_are_quite_a_few_plot_holes_now_in_the/

Thanks Brandon, that’s very interesting about the target point offset when you look up/down. One suggestion I have is to try varying the target point based not just on the angle of the camera, but also based on the distance of the camera from the character. As an example of the impact this can have, see the screenshots attached.

1st – Gives you an idea of the location – Divinities Reach slope.

2nd – When looking up the slope and moving the camera upwards, this is about as close as you can get before the target starts to move, leading to 3rd and 4th as the character drops down off the screen. At no point does the character overpower the screen.

5th – Looking down the slope instead – Move the camera upwards, leading to 6th, 7th, and 8th – camera still pointing into head of character, even though it’s massive and beginning to ghost out. 9th – character finally dropping out of frame.
as target moves.

Because the target point offset is based on the camera angle relative to the horizontal, the slope of the terrain massively affects the end result. A downward slope pushes the camera that much closer to the character before the offset kicks in, leading to screen-full-of-character-itis. If the calculation took the actual distance from the character to the camera into account as well, then maybe the effect could be normalized to somewhere in the middle, regardless of the terrain?

Right, time for bed, I will ponder the Smart Pivot some more when I am awake :-)

(As an aside, while playing around making screenshots for this, I realised that the “character obscuring camera” issue is generally rather better than I remembered it being during normal play. I vaguely recall getting all excited about the Boss camera being improved a while back (Feature Pack 1?), so it’s quite possible it happened at the same time and I was too busy getting on with playing to realize :-)

I think we’re all assuming it will match what the Chinese client does, which is unlocks at lvl 10, because the rest of the “Levelling unlock” system is ported straight across from there. And also, we’re making that assumption because if we make enough noise about it now, there’s a small chance they might realise how stupid it is and change it before it’s too late.

I really do not understand this change. There were nothing whatsoever wrong with the story as it was. You started from the beginning, right at the beginning, you got a bit of the story to do every few levels, and could usually do a few in a row if you wanted to and could cope with being underlevelled. You could then explore the world in parallel, with the story moving you on to new areas of the map every so often.

Now you get to do a chunk of it, then aimlessly wander about until the next chunk unlocks, and possibly sends you in the opposite direction to the one you were wandering in.

If they really do make it so the first chunk unlocks at lvl 10, then they will truly have gone insane.

Really makes no sense.

I am in the process of levelling a Thief. I created him before the trait changes, so don’t have to unlock anything, but I am still finding traits completely useless at the moment.

I am level 50, and would love to be experimenting with builds and trait combinations by now, and generally learning how to play the class properly. However, I have a grand total of 4 trait points, which gives me access to 2 major adept traits. Which is utterly useless. I can’t even put all 4 points in to the same line, and finding two traits which synergise is very hard. If I actually had to unlock the traits as well, then that would be even worse. Seriously, did any of the developers actually try playing a new character from scratch with the new system before they implemented it, because it’s utterly crap!?

These changes should not be applied to lvl 80 characters. There’s enough inequality caused by RNG and stupid design decisions in the game already (I’m looking at you, amount of silk required to craft a complete set of ascended light armor). Making it so greatsword wielding characters have a higher chance to pick up a more valuable greatsword as loot just makes it worse. And if the changes are “subtle” and therefore not noticeable, then what’s the point in them? They either have a visible effect or they might as well not exist.

I really want one of those Bows :-)

Either that, or you will fall victim to the “Mystery tonic disguised tree army of doom” from an opposing side :-)

Ohoni.6057:

Ideally the story missions would adjust to your level, so that if you wanted to blitz through the story you could start doing so at level 2 and by the time you got to the “level 10” story step if you were level 4, it would have level 4 enemies in it. Then the second chapter would unlock at level 10, rather than the first. The first ten levels just seem like they would be such a drag without any story steps.

I completely agree.

In either case, if they are unlocking them in chunks of ten then I hope they’ve gotten rid of some of the pointless “Go back to your home city to speak to Zoija / whoever, so she can just send you back out to somewhere close to where you were previously” bits, which annoyed me first time round and would be even worse if there wasn’t even a level gap to possibly make up first.

Scrye, my assumption here is that those objects are not actually collidable with either. So if you find one of those trees, chances are you can actually walk right through it. I’ve seen similar things with some awnings and sheets of material which you think are solid, but then you try to jump on them and find they’re not to your peril!

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Pretty sure some botting programs have meshed the ground of gw2. Could something similar be easily done?

I imagine that the botting programs are fairly coarse in their requirements. IE, they assume it’s ground if it’s flat, or has an angle less than x% from a horizontal plane, and therefore treat it as a walkable on surface. This wouldn’t work for the camera though, as something like a big rock outcropping which you can’t quite walk up the side of would still need to be counted as “ground”, otherwise you’d get in an unholy mess.

Oh how I would love to have access to a Beta Weekend 1 build, to see how the camera worked then before they had to monkey around with it for Unknown Reasons :-)

I think what Branden is saying is that the camera doesn’t know the difference between ground and, say, tree, or barrow, or anything else solid. They are all just collidable objects. So the tricky thing is not to end up smart-pivoting off of the tree you were just running past as you were adjusting your camera angle.

Makovorn.1706:

The question is, do we want this (especially if it’s a complex thing to implement) and why not just opt for something simpler to achieve similar results, like allowing us to adjust the camera pivot higher. Because this, combined with more vertical FoV, will give you the kind of observability you need to comfortably observe players up keep walls (the example Rengaru mentioned).

You see, with more FoV, comes the added benefit of an increased distance between the camera and the character (think wide-angle lens on a camera and how objects are farther than they appear), so you zoom in (but your character is not up in your face), the camera collides with the character’s body (and the pivot point is now higher, so no legs/torso/upskirts in the way) – you see over your character’s head + more FoV = more observability … and problem solved as far as I can see.

I would not be surprised if even a small height adjustment upwards could make a significant improvement in visibility when trying to look up. Say it was located just above the top of the player’s head, rather than inside it. When zoomed out, it would not make all that much difference to the overall view. (In keeping with the “The area behind you is important for combat purposes” ethos") However, when zooming in, the player character would only be seen in the bottom half of the screen, giving you the entire top half to actually see things in, which is way more than you sometimes get at the moment. Might not suit everyone, but if it’s adjustable even to a small degree then this could provide a massive QOL improvement. Of course, it might look terrible, but you don’t know until you try do you! :-)

Wanted: Monetization Specialist. Maths skills not required. Understanding of the phrase “micro-transactions” not required. Ability to price everything 4 times higher than the average player would impulse buy at mandatory.

Seriously guys, I suggest an experiment – put an awesome looking complete set of armor onto the gem store at 200 gems, then sit back and watch the entire player base buy it, netting you far more money than you get by pricing everything way too high.

Timmf – the line-of-sight test is actually already in the game. If you try to put anything which is collidable between the camera and your character, then the camera will instantly jump forwards to a point where the object is behind the camera rather than in front. It’s horrible behavior, but that’s what we have at the moment. (Guild Wars 1 made the object translucent instead of moving the camera, which worked much better, but they didn’t have building interiors to cope with and other awkward things like that!)

Pondering out loud the implications of moving the focus point – Say you are stood next to a vertical wall, and zoomed out somewhat. If you attempt to look right, then the camera currently pivots around your character, meaning you zoom rapidly in along the wall until very close to your character.

Using a smart pivot, the focus point is instead moved in an arc to the right, staying focused at the same distance from the camera as your character.

Say during this arcing movement another object intersects the line between the camera and the new imaginary focus point. What should the camera do? I guess it doesn’t have to do anything, as it doesn’t matter that the imaginary focus point isn’t visible anymore, you are just panning the camera around.

A problem though would be deciding when the camera should go back to focusing on your character. Say you are pivoted away by 90 degrees, then you sidestep away from the wall and keep running – should the camera swing back immediately to your character,, or should it stay where looking at what it was looking at? If it stays looking at what it was, how do you get it back looking at the character again?

I can imagine it getting very confusing if running around in combat, as you could suddenly find yourself looking away from your character completely, which could be very confusing.

Mmm, tricksy one.

Vol.7601:

Design a formula or check that will activate the moment an object is detected. At that point, the camera view ends up zooming in to a FPS view. And depending on the distance between the object and the player’s back, the camera will zoom in/out of FPS mode.

Mmm, interesting idea – if the object the camera is trying not to be inside is close enough to the character to cause the character to fill a certain amount of the screen, then go first person instead.

However, would this not be succeptible to the already existing problem where the camera rapidly “bounces” between zoomed out and zoomed in, as objects pass between where the camera should be and the character? Only it would be even worse because you could be bouncing between fully zoomed out and first person very rapidly. (Good example for bouncy behavior is the top of spikey fences – used to be some great example in Lion’s Arch, but not sure if they all got destroyed :-)

(I know this is a separate discussion, but the “bounce” is possibly the most annoying feature of the existing camera, so the aim should be to stop it happening and not do anything that would make it worse.)

Perhaps rather than the mythical “First person view”, what we actually need is for the character’s “translucent” effect which kicks in when the camera is very close to it to be ramped up significantly. So you can still see a ghost of your character, but much less of it than currently.

Okay, so thinking about “Smart Pivot”. The main issue at the moment is the inability to look up without ending up with your character filling the majority of your screen before anything useful starts to happen.

My main is a max height Asura, and I run on a 1600 × 1200 4:3 screen. If standing on level ground, as you look up the camera rolls along the ground to start with, getting closer to your character, focused on a point around the characters lower head / neck. The player character gets larger and larger, until a certain point, beyond which the behaviour seems to change. At this point the camera focus point starts to move up towards the sky, rather than being fixed, and the character begins to go translucent to some degree.

The issue I have is that the change in behavior does not happen soon enough. By the time the focus point starts to change, I can pretty much only see my own character and not a lot else. I don’t know how code behind the scenes decides when to change behavior, but if it was able to do so sooner, so the camera started looking “up” while the character filled less of the screen, then this might help enormously.

Hard to really know without trying it out, but I can recommend rolling a max height Asura and experimenting. (Edit: Preferably an Asura with Big Hair too! :-))

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

narwhalsbend.7059:

Do the new changes mean I can’t do WvW until I level to 18? What’s with all these restrictions?

That’s not exactly what’s happening. If you have a brand new account, you will only be able to use the PvP and WvW icons after your first character has unlocked them for your account. After that, it’ll pretty much be the same!

Again, this change will be mostly relevant to new players who will not have to think about that part of the game until they’ve been able to learn the basics. If they’re specifically interested in those part of the game, they can still travel to the relevant portal and jump into the fray!

Way to be as patronising as possible to new players.

“Come play Guild Wars 2! Amazing lore and storyline! (But only every 10 levels, and you don’t get to start it until you’re already bored of wandering around with no direction”. Amazing Player vs Player action! (But only once you’ve been playing for a while. No jumping in for the sheer hell of it on your first day! Tut tut!)"

Yeah, I am struggling to understand the revamp of the levelling system, which there was nothing wrong with in the first place.

“It feels like they’re going from a smooth continuity during leveling to a disconcertingly staccato progression.” – true indeed!

I am levelling a thief at the moment, and have got him to lvl 50 out of 80. I have access to a whopping 4 trait points, which means I can customize my build…not really much at all. I want to start experimenting with the traits, but I simply can’t unlock enough of them to make it worth doing.

I would be perfectly happy for key-farming to be nerfed, as long as they don’t take the utterly stupid approach of removing the story completely until you get to lvl 10. That’s a surefire way to lose players who like their games with some actual story / lore. Assuming they are too stupid to cope with a story for 10 levels while learning the rest of the game would be patronising in the extreme. (Rather than just semi-patronising, as the rest of the “levelling up unlocks” seem to be.)

If they want to stop key farming, then they can switch theBL Key reward to be something you get in the 10-20 lvl story range instead, which would have the desired effect without removing the story from the game until it’s “unlocked”.

Asmodeus.5782:

I truly hope that’s not the case. Getting sucked into the early missions of Charr PS right away was what convinced me to stay in the game.

Quote for truth. I really hope the first chunk of the Story is unlocked from the very start, because the story is the best thing about the early levels of the game. Gives you something to focus on, leads you around the map, and sucks you into the lore. If I had to get to level 10 just wandering around a starter zone aimlessly, I’m sure I wouldn’t have made it out of Beta weekend 1.

I think the Personal Story changes really suck. I loved doing the story first time round, especially the early level ones. They’re a great introduction to the lore, give you something to focus on, and having them spaced out so you can do one every few levels was good. If they unlock in chunks, you get to spend 10 levels having no storyline at all and just wandering around a zone with nothing to focus on. Which is fine when you’re trying to speed-level a character but a really bad idea for first-time-through the game. The story is what ties everything together and gives you a reason to go to the different zones.

That being said, if the unlocks have to stay at every 10 levels, then whatever you do, DO NOT make the player wait until lvl 10 to start the Story. There is nothing more off-putting in an MMO than not having a story you can follow from the beginning. This would be the worst possible implementation ever.

Tact is overrated. For some reason games companies have not yet fathomed out that honesty in forum posts wins over Marketing Spin any day of the week! :-)

Lord Kuru.3685:

Here’s a guess that fits with a lot of Anet’s behavior:

Someone at or near the top of Anet’s hierarchy has tunnel vision and judges success or failure using metrics from (only) the LS. Those who wish to keep their jobs have incentive to pump up LS metrics as high as possible, regardless of how it affects the game. One easy way to do this: do not work on or release content that are not LS related.

As I recall from an off-official-channels post by one of the devs involved, the metrics for SAB World 2 were terrible, which I imagine is why we’re never going to see it again. It’s just not worth their while to put development resources into something a very small percentage of the player base are likely to be interested in.

No idea why they don’t just turn it back on with a satirical Coming Soon™ no entry sign on worlds 3 and 4 mind you, but then I guess the all-controlling marketing department wouldn’t be able to spin that very well so they’d prefer to just abandon it.

Quoted from someone elses post for truth: “Against all odds, the level of incompetence and inability to understand what features players actually want has gone up another notch.”

The whole point of wanting different colour tags is so that commanders can organise their colours amongst themselves, so people know which tag they should be following.

WvW players are completely gold poor compared to PvE players, so the very people who this feature will actually be useful for are the people who can’t afford to buy X extra colours just so they have the flexibility to switch when it’s needed.

Utter design failure. (Or possibly utter deliberate cash-grab, although if so then it will backfire massively as all the WvW commanders quit in disgust.)

Surely the whole point of having different colours is so people don’t get confused who they’re supposed to be following around. Making someone pay another 300g just to have a different colour completely negates the ability for people to switch colours to suit the situation and who else is on the map.

Biggest utter fail in design history ever!

1. The automatic conversion of skins to Wardrobe is a bit buggy. It completely failed to trigger on my main char no matter what I did, and only kicked in when I took an alt in.

2. You appear to have forgotten to add a Banker to the Heart of the Mists. Seeing as we now have to keep multiple sets of items if we want to switch appearances without paying, we really need bank access in there.

Snowreap, based on what Colin said above:

- Splitters aren’t sold any more because, all skins you would get with a splitter will already be unlocked by the wardrobe system automatically.

I believe that come the patch, both the current appearance of your item, and the appearance it had originally, will become unlocked in your wardrobe.

You should then be able to use transmutation charges to re-apply the original skin to your existing item.

Thankyou! :-) ………………………..

Could someone point me in the direction of the Ready Up! stream URL please.

I can’t for the life of me find it in a sticky or obvious thread.

Cheers

Wanze.8410:

Your daily 40 Linen Scraps are easily farmable in 15-20 min and you even get some cotton and silk along the way.

Where can you farm that much Linen from, because I’ve gotten that amount of scraps in about 2 months worth of normal play!?

Yeah, the Asura Light armor might as well be replaced with a clown outfit. It’s laughably bad!

As someone who plays D/D ele pretty much exclusively, both in WvW and PvE, I have the following feedback:

Diamond Skin sounds interesting – I regularly get nuked down in WvW by a condition spike before having the chance to do, well, anything at all. Will be nice to have a build option which might let me get involved in the fight first before dying :-)

Moving all three of Cleansing Wave, Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina to Master tier is a mahoosive nerf to D/D survivability. (And we’re really squishy already in case you hadn’t noticed!)

Moving good defensive traits into higher tiers of Water and Arcane is the opposite of what you need to do if you want to encourage better use of Fire / Air / Earth. At the moment you can at least do 10 water for Cleansing Wave and 10 Arcana for either extra vigor or Elemental Attunement and still go for a damage build. All these particular changes will do is guarantee that most D/D ele’s run at least 20 / 20 Water and Arcane, further decreasing the Air / Fire / Earth possibilities.

I should also add that I always play with my camera fully zoomed out. Not sure if this would make any difference.

The “Dialog” volume slider seems to be used for both NPC cut scene / scripted dialog and also for player character combat utterances. This is driving me nuts, because the player character utterances are so much louder than the scripted conversations.

I keep having to turn the slider up so I’m not struggling to hear scripted NPC conversation in events, but then back down again to prevent my characters shouts from overpowering everything else when in combat.

For reference, I play a Female Asura Elementalist on a 2 speaker / headphone setup. I have really had enough of “Rage at maximum!” and “Accellerating!” blasting out.

Is there any chance you could normalize the perceived volumes a little, or at least give us some way to turn off the player character shouts?

I am having very similar issues to you.

I used to have a GTX 460, vary rarely crashed. Upgraded to a GTX 760 not that long ago. Initially things were fine, but in the last couple of weeks I have been crashing more and more often.

Have run a MemTest86+ with no errors. Upgraded to the latest drivers today and it’s only made things worse :-(

Yes, the lag in the Borderlands is off the chart today.

To be honest I can’t tell if I like it or not yet, because the lag is so bad I can’t fight properly :-(

Yeah, the lag is unbelievable today. You broke your game!

This bug is still in existence, so bumping the thread for visibility, seeing as this forum is now getting some dev attention!